Woodinville, WA | Fine Dining Restaurant | Farm Box Subscription

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Key Results

• Monthly Farm Box brings The Herbfarm's seasonal ingredients directly into members' homes
• Zero-waste outlet for farm abundance that doesn't have a place on the nightly menu
• Monthly touchpoints with guests who would otherwise visit only three or four times a year
• Seamless logistics handled by Table22, leaving the team free to focus on what they grow and cook
  
  

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A legacy planted in 1986

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In 1986, Ron Zimmerman and his wife Carrie Van Dyck transformed the family farm's garage in Fall City, Washington into one of the most consequential restaurants in American culinary history, serving educational luncheons built entirely around what was growing outside. The phrase "farm-to-table" didn't exist yet, but The Herbfarm was busy inventing the concept.

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Over three decades, the restaurant earned what few American establishments can claim: a AAA Five Diamond rating, a devoted following among serious food travelers, and a nightly single-seating dinner with immersive farm experiences. When a fire destroyed the original restaurant in 1997, Ron and Carrie rebuilt, reopening in Woodinville in 2001, exactly fifteen years to the day from their first meal.

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Chris Weber and Jack Gingrich met at The Herbfarm in 2010, working together for a decade before Ron and Carrie's retirement in 2021 passed the kitchen and the legacy into their hands. Now in its third generation, The Herbfarm remains what it has always been: a place where the seasons set the menu, the farm sets the pace, and genuine human connection is the whole point.

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The untapped potential in farm-to-table

The Herbfarm's on-site farm is a working operation, planted well in advance of each season, and supplying much of what ends up on the nightly nine-course menu. Chris and his culinary team plan around the harvest, but came to realize their thoughtfully-designed menu might not be maximizing the potential of their land.

"We've talked a lot over the years about our farm as a place that has the potential to grow a lot of food. Being a small restaurant that has very specific needs and wants from our farm, it's almost like — I wish we could just produce more food."
- Chris Weber, Executive Chef at The Herbfarm

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At the same time as their farm could do more, their dining room had reached its limit; The Herbfarm operates on a single seating Thursday through Sunday, with a reservation book that can fill months out. Even their most loyal guests might visit only three or four times in a good year, a natural ceiling that comes with running a destination restaurant. The relationship between the restaurant, the farm, and its community was deep, but in need of a way to grow.

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Bringing the farm home

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The Herbfarm partnered with Table22 to launch a monthly Field Box: a curated selection of seasonal ingredients sourced directly from the restaurant's farm and the same network of Pacific Northwest producers who supply the kitchen. Each box changes with the season, a premise subscribers know and enthusiastically support as a way to deepen their relationship to the farm.

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Some inclusions are things the kitchen loves to cook at home, dishes that don't necessarily fit the format of a nine-course dinner but are still, in Chris's words, "tasty, delicious things that we like to share." Others are pure farm surplus: the rhubarb coming on in April, the abundance of a particular herb at peak. The box gives all of it somewhere meaningful to go.

"It's a great outlet for a lot of things that we either can't use on the menu or have an abundance of," Chris says.

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The biggest surprise has been what that abundance does once it lands in a member's kitchen. One member discovered sturgeon through a box inclusion, something they never would have bought for themselves at a store, and came back to the restaurant gushing over it.

"Because we've curated it as part of the box, they get exposed to something new," Jack says. "And it turns out it's something they really enjoy." Members arrive at the dining room with context they didn't have before. They've cooked with these ingredients, they know the purveyor's name, and they've tasted what the season has been doing. This deepens the conversation, and the meal means more.

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For Chris, the month-to-month creative process carries its own reward. "The excitement of it being something different every month is exciting to me to pull together. I'm glad other people appreciate it, too."

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How Table22 makes it happen

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Table22 handles the logistics — billing, member communications, fulfillment coordination — so the team can focus on what they actually want to do: grow things, cook things, and share them. "It does feel like we just kind of have to build the boxes," Jack says, "which is the enjoyable part."

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The responsiveness goes beyond the platform itself. Jack describes his Table22 contact as reachable any day of the week, someone who treats every problem as her own. That kind of partnership, he notes, isn't something you can take for granted anymore.

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The delivery cadence has become its own benefit: as members come in to pick up their boxes and bring their kids, Jack finds himself finally meeting the families of guests he's known for years.

"We get to see the same people once a month," he says. "For most of our regular guests, we're a three- or four-times-a-year place. To get to see these folks every month, to hear about what they made, or sometimes their failures, and tell them, 'oh, maybe try it this way next time,' it becomes a little bit more of an interactive dialogue."

The support from Table22 allows The Herbfarm to extend a monthly offering with the same intention it has always put into its sourcing, its seating, and its relationships. And with the club sold-out and onto a waitlist, the team can count on it as a reliable source of growth for the business and their farm well into the future.

Our platform, your farm. Welcome to the Club.

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